Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (8 page)

Both the Earl and Countess ate sparingly. Lord Carnarvon thoroughly enjoyed Turkish cigarettes, to be smoked over brandy and cigars with the gentlemen guests in the Dining Room. The ladies took coffee, in the Drawing Room. Almina didn’t like to spend too long over a dinner party as the staff would have to clear and wash up and prepare for the next day.

There were always quantities of dripping left over from the preparation of these meals, so local people would bring along basins and Minnie Wills, who arrived at Highclere as a kitchen maid in 1902, would let them have some nourishing dripping in return for a penny or two placed in the slot of a neatly-made wooden box; at Christmas the coins would be shared amongst the servants.

Eventually the staff had their hot supper in the servants’ hall, which was directly beneath the State Dining Room. It was a large room dominated by a massive seventeenth-century refectory table made of oak. ‘Our food was as good as in the Dining Room,’ according to Mrs Hart, a long-term Highclere resident who began as the fourth housemaid. She remembered learning to dance in the servants’ hall
after supper and there was often singing around the piano. The maids finished their day with hot cocoa with the head housemaid in the servants’ sitting room, a separate space from the main servants’ hall, and much cosier – full of easy chairs and decorated with framed prints.

It would be foolish to pretend that the life of the domestic staff was idyllic, however. In some great houses, any female member of staff who had ‘a follower’, i.e. a boyfriend, would be instantly dismissed – a practice which seems barbaric today – although Highclere may have been more liberal in this respect as numerous marriages occurred between estate staff. The pay was not generous, but of course food and lodging were included, so wages could be saved and service in a household such as the Carnarvons’ was generally seen as a good job with possibilities for advancement. By the 1890s, changes to legislation meant that servants got a week’s paid holiday a year, as well as their half-days on Sundays and, sometimes, an evening off in the week. During house parties the routine was arduous and days were extremely long and busy, but when the family was away in London or abroad, there was more opportunity to relax.

The work might have been hard, but the rule at Highclere was not at all tyrannical. Minnie Wills always said that she had come from a home that was not happy and Highclere became more her home than that one. The piano in the servants’ hall and the care implied by that cocoa at the end of the day attest to a benevolent regime. The staff enjoyed trips to Newbury and, later on, to the racecourse. There was also an annual dance, held in the Library, to which staff from all the other large houses in the neighbourhood were
invited. Lord and Lady Carnarvon upheld a tradition that Highclere should be ‘a household of kindness’. Winifred, Almina’s sister-in-law, remarked on this approvingly. And as Nanny Moss, the 6th Earl’s much-loved nurse put it, ‘No one from Highclere Castle will ever go to Hell.’

Perhaps it was at one of these dances, or at the races, that Minnie and Arthur Hayter, the groom, first got chatting. It was the beginning of a long friendship that would eventually end in romance. Relationships between members of staff were of course relatively common, but they could only progress if the couple married, as, quite apart from any moral codes, their lives were so segregated. For a woman, marriage meant the end of her working life, so many servants delayed their wedding a number of years, until they were more financially secure. Some women also decided to prioritise moving up the household’s structure to become housekeeper, or a lady’s maid. That might well have been the motivating factor in Minnie and Arthur’s extended courtship.

Highclere was a symbiotic system, and mutual respect was the key to its success. The 5th Earl prided himself on an Old World courtesy, and that set the tone for the entire household. He took an interest in the well-being of the staff and the cottagers on the estate; often a donation would be made towards a fund for a tenant whose livestock had died, and money was also made available for the staff to have medical treatment. This attitude was maintained by his successor. The 6th Earl wrote in his memoirs that he considered his staff the lynchpin of his establishment and freely admitted that he would not be able to run Highclere without the invaluable help of his butler (Robert Taylor) of forty-four years’ standing.

The Castle was, of course, only one part of the domain. The estate was a self-contained community with its own forge, sawmills, carpenters, brickies, dairy farm and electricians’ workshops. There were vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, greenhouses and a brewery, pigs and cattle. There were security staff and gatekeepers, plantsmen, gamekeepers and foresters.

The gardens were extensive and, as in all great houses, the quality of the flowers for cutting and produce to be used in the kitchens was a matter of great pride. The head gardener in 1895 was William Pope, a fierce man, protective of his territory. He had between twenty and twenty-five men working under him. The walled kitchen garden was a good five acres in size, with a charming orchard beyond it, framed by plum trees whose fruit was famously delicious.

Mr Pope had not only to produce food throughout the year but also to know how to maximise yields and to store it so that nothing should go to waste. Greenhouses lined the south-facing walls to extend the growing season. A vinery, peach house and orangery were heated by a boiler, whilst rainwater was collected from all the gutters. A north-facing fernery provided a collection of different flower species for the Castle and there were roses from the Rose House and more flowers in the designated cutting beds.

The dairy yard lay near the kitchen gardens, and when the family was in town rather than at Highclere, the milk and cheeses were sent up to the London house in small silver churns. These churns are still piled, somewhat haphazardly, in one of the dozens of storerooms in the basement of the Castle. All houses accumulate clutter, and the nooks and crannies of Highclere provide ample room for hundreds of years’ worth.

Opposite the dairy was the hayrack for the dairy yard and, next to that, beneath the shelter of the walls of the great kitchen garden, were the chickens. The damp boggy field leading west from the kitchen garden was used to grow potatoes.

Every day, Pope would send his senior gardener, Samuel Ward, to enquire of the cook what was needed. There was an entire family of delightfully named Digweed boys working as Highclere gardeners, and one of them would run up to the kitchens with the fruit and vegetables required.

The sawmills lay across the cricket field near White Oak, the large sprawling house where James Rutherford, the agent, lived. They had been refitted by the 5th Earl with the latest steam-powered saw. The division of labour in terms of overseeing the house and estate was firmly along traditional lines: anything outside the Castle was the Earl’s concern and, just as Almina had wasted no time in refurbishing the Drawing Room, Carnarvon had spent money on the latest equipment out at the sawmill. He was very much a gadget man, delighting in the advances in technology that were coming fast throughout the 1890s.

The yard outside the mill was stacked high with different types of wood. The estate carpenters had a stock of planks, boarding, joists or posts; everything they needed. There were thirty men working under head forester William Storie and, as in the gardens, one family in particular, the Annetts, worked for generations as foresters.

Henry Maber, who became head gamekeeper in 1896, was a large, solid man who had moved to Highclere from East Anglia. He rode a cob and was steeped in knowledge of the countryside. He lived with his family in a house
called Broadspear, overlooking the sweeping, Capability Brown-designed lawns. The house was close to the rearing pens at Penwood, the neighbouring village. The young pheasants were raised there before being taken out to the estate’s various woods in late spring and left to grow to maturity in time for the shooting season.

It was a very prestigious job because Highclere was regarded as one of the great Edwardian shoots. Lord Carnarvon was one of the finest shots in the country and his close friends Lord de Grey and Lord Ashburton rivalled him for the same accolade. They were unsparing in their comments if they thought Lord Carnarvon had mismanaged a drive or his keeper was not up to form. Maber was always worrying about the weather, where the birds were and whether he could meet His Lordship’s desired bag. He had four under-keepers and another fifteen men working for him. They were all given cottages and lived at the furthest-flung corners of the estate so that they could patrol the limits for poachers. He reported to both Lord Carnarvon and to Major Rutherford.

Like other estate staff, Maber talked frankly. One morning he greeted Lord Carnarvon with, ‘Excuse me milord; afore you goes any further I’d like you to get to the lee side of me as Mrs Maber told me my breath didn’t smell very sweet this morning.’

Some of the gardeners would earn extra money as beaters on the shoots in winter. One of the Digweeds was acting as a stop on a drive for Maber when the latter found him relieving himself against a tree. ‘Now, Digweed you turnip-headed gardener, you stop that there dung spreading and get on with your job!’

His son was Charles Maber who grew up, learned the same countryside lore and served in turn as head keeper.

The U-shaped Georgian brick courtyard to the west of the Castle housed the small brewery and the riding and carriage horses in large cobbled stables. The carriages were also kept here. The grooms lived in a warren of rooms above, sleeping two to a bedroom, their trunks, full of possessions, at the ends of their beds. Arthur Hayter arrived to take up the position of most junior groom and coachman in 1895. His family were farmers and Arthur’s new job was seen as a definite step up. He loved the horses in his care and could manage them brilliantly, whispering to them when they were upset. There were at least a dozen horses and one groom for each pair so the stables hummed with activity. Arthur reported to head coachman, Henry Brickell, who had driven the just-married couple on their wedding day. Brickell was a longstanding employee and a much trusted, steady man.

Nobody could possibly have known it, but Highclere was passing into a golden time. Everyone who lived and worked there was caught up in the last spectacular flourishing of a secure existence. The rules were understood by everybody: upstairs and downstairs worlds interacted only in very specific and controlled ways. A new Countess, even one with grand ideas and the cash to carry them out, was unlikely to provoke much lasting change. In 1895 the Empire was at its peak, Queen Victoria was two years away from her Diamond Jubilee, and Britain was, without question, the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. It was a time of peace and progress, of supreme self-belief. The threat to the old ways, as yet scarcely perceived, came
not from any individual upstairs but from the new technology and the bigger political forces reshaping society and the balance of power in Europe.

If you’d asked Henry Brickell how he felt about the future, though, he might not have been too cheery. His job was increasingly marginalised, in a sign of things to come, by Lord Carnarvon’s passion for gadgets. The 5th Earl was exploring the exciting possibilities offered by the new horsepower – the motor car.

Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon, 1899.
(photo credit i1.1)

Highclere Castle, drawn in 1889.
(photo credit i1.2)